Richard D. Ryder

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Richard D. Ryder (born 1940) is a Britishpsychologist who, after performing psychology experiments on animals, began to speak out against the practice, and became one of the pioneers of the modern animal liberation movement. He was Mellon Professor at Tulane University, New Orleans, and is the author of Painism: A Modern Morality and Putting Morality Back into Politics, due to be published in 2006.

Ryder was a contributor to the influential Animals, Men and Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans (1972) edited by Roslind and Stanley Godlovitch and John Harris. It was in a review of this book for the New York Review of Books that Peter Singer, now Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, put forward the basic arguments, based on utilitarianism, that in 1975 became Animal Liberation, the book often referred to as the "bible" of the animal rights movement.

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Ryder coined the term speciesism in 1970 while lying in the bath, [1] and first used it in a privately-printed leaflet published in Oxford that same year.

He calls his current position on the moral status of non-human animals painism, arguing that all beings who feel pain deserve rights. Painism can be seen as a third way between Peter Singer's utilitarian position and Tom Regan's deontological rights view. It combines the utilitarian view that moral status comes from the ability to feel pain with the rights view prohibition on using others as a means to our ends. [How to reference and link to summary or text]

He has criticized Regan’s criterion for inherent worth, arguing that all beings who feel pain have inherent value. He has also criticized the utilitarian idea that exploitation of others can be justified if there is an overall gain in pleasure, arguing that: "One of the problems with the utilitarian view is that, for example, the sufferings of a gang-rape victim can be justified if the rape gives a greater sum total of pleasure to the rapists." [How to reference and link to summary or text]